Serious about staying safe during this COVID pandemic? Get right with keeping your immune system in shape.
There is no day of our lives wherein the status of our defensive fighters is not important, but given our present circumstances it’s, like, super-important. Mental-emotional stress, when chronic and persistent, contributes to dysregulation of the immune system and thus can increase both the chances of infection as well as difficulty in overcoming the infection once it’s taken place.
Meditation is potentially a valuable practice for decreasing stress signals in the body–but it’s kinda like brushing our teeth, we need to do it on a daily basis over the long-term to enjoy optimal results. Studies have demonstrated that this millennia-old practice does indeed confer health benefits, including improvement in mental-emotional health and decreasing pain.
Someone out there loves you. Do them and yourself a service and add a daily meditation program to your list of precautionary measures. Here is a short-list of resources to start your research:
> An earlier Epicenter Wellness blog post on breath-counting meditation, a Zen Buddhist practice I first learned at The Village Zendo. And for what it’s worth, over 10 years later this foundation-level work remains just as relevant in helping uplift the savage heart.
> MBSR–mindfulness-based stress reduction–is a popular form of secularized meditation that has also been a subject of clinical research
> Headspace is an app that others have told me has been beneficial
Full disclosure: I get paid by no one to list the above. I mention them solely as a jump-off point for you to investigate on your own.
It’s telling that absolutely none of the CDC’s official guidelines on protecting ourselves from COVID-19 speaks on diet and lifestyle factors that improve neuro-endocrine-immune status. Be about that smart money though–expand your information universe to include educating yourself on how to support health from within, and not just reducing/eliminating exposure to an “enemy” out-there.
#nationalstressawarenessmonth
Epicenter Wellness 